If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

<< Beg      < Prev

Next >      End >>

Love Him Or Leave Him; Love Her Or Leave Her?

Although the culture’s attention is focused on helping women leave, we have seen men also fear leaving. They fear that leaving their wife means losing their children; that leaving their wife means leaving their children to be abused (abusive spouses are often abusive parents). It is men who have no shelters to turn to, no hot lines to call, no genetic heritage or socialization to ask for help, no education to request a restraining order; who believe the police will laugh at them; who feel dirty laundry shouldn’t be aired in public; who have few men friends, fewer men’s support groups, minimal vocabulary for discussing these issues...

One of the most destructive-to-women myths is that women are powerless to leave men – the men will just come after them and kill them. The myth is perpetuated by films like Sleeping With the Enemy, in which an abused woman runs away after faking her own death and changing her identity, but her husband nevertheless tracks her down. The message is “there’s no way you can escape an abusive man and remain alive – they're the cleverest, most psychopathic, schizoid terrorists on earth.” But is it true?

Some men do come after women, and some women do hire contract killers. There are no guarantees for either sex that they will be safe if they leave or stay. But almost every time I have read of a spouse “coming after” the party who has left, one or more of these “five catalysts to violence-after-leaving” has occurred.

The Five Catalysts to Violence-After-Leaving: Deplete the bank account. Leave a vitriolic, rejecting note. Take the kids. Have the spouse arrested. Have a lover and go to her or his house.

Obviously, arresting a spouse is sometimes not only necessary but appropriate. But it is a risk factor, to be balanced by the risk factor of not arresting. If the arrest has been manipulated to keep children, the risk of retaliation increases. The purpose of knowing these catalysts is to empower an abused spouse to leave safely. The two rules of thumb are, “set firm boundaries” and “help your partner save face” even as you enforce the boundaries.

For a husband who leaves, there’s a sixth catalyst: the larger your life insurance policy, the greater the incentive to have you killed, and making it appear as an accident, as discussed above.

The “Battered Woman Syndrome,” then, is an insult to women’s intelligence. It suggests that only women cannot figure out a way of leaving while her spouse is at work, or on a sales trip, or on a fishing weekend; or that only she cannot feign a weekend trip with a womanfriend or to her parents. But in the final analysis, there are no guarantees of violence avoidance for either sex. The best we can do is to know that battering decreases as listening increases.

We occasionally read of men banging down the door of their home and hurting the woman and children. But remember, this is almost always when he has been evicted. Not when she has left. Were the roles reversed and he had gotten a restraining order to prevent her from returning home and seeing the children, the chances of her resorting to violence would also increase.

Both sexes harass each other after separation. But women worry more whether his phone calls, for example, indicate physical danger. The three best clues are (1) their personal history of physical violence; (2) how much he feels rejected; and (3) whether or not she has taken the children “behind his back.”

If he has no personal history of physical violence, then she protects herself best by negotiating with him (not dictating to him) a specific contract – of times to talk, of times when he versus she will have the children. Most men who aren’t made to feel unilaterally rejected are good about sticking to contracts if they know they are firm and if the woman is sticking to her end of the deal. A contract allows him to focus on what he will receive rather than on what he has lost.